Category: Jason Millman
Federal Funds to Help Families Facing Foreclosures
FORECLOSURES
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Jason Millman
Boston University Washington News Service
Feb. 26, 2008
WASHINGTON – Nineteen different Massachusetts financial counseling groups will receive federal funds to help combat the growing foreclosure crisis, congressmen announced Tuesday.
Overall 143 such organizations across the country in the areas with the highest risk for foreclosures will receive $130 million in grants that were approved in December. The grants will fund sessions between housing counseling agencies and home owners who are in foreclosure or who are at risk of foreclosure. About 500,000 counseling sessions are being funded in the country, with 15,000 of those in Massachusetts. The problem is particularly keen in Massachusetts, where foreclosure deeds more than doubled from 2006 to 2007.
U.S. Rep. John W. Olver, D-Amherst, chairman of the House subcommittee that arranged the funding, said it is impossible as of now to predict how much will go toward each Massachusetts agency.
“It’s all dependent upon where the greatest need is, where the greatest risk of foreclosures are,” Mr. Olver said.
The funding will be distributed by NeighborWorks America, a non-profit organization created by Congress.
Eileen Fitzgerald, the company’s chief operating officer, said the counseling sessions will allow home owners to meet with advisers at no cost. The advisers will help the home owners analyze their financial situations and then review what steps should be taken. Many cases could be helped through refinancing mortgages or devising a budget, but advisers will help home owners prepare for the worst-case scenario if necessary.
“Even if there’s no way to resolve this, they’ll help home owners think about what’s the best way to go into foreclosure,” Ms. Fitzgerald said.
Last year, more than 7,653 foreclosure deeds were issued in Massachusetts, more than double the 3,086 in 2006, according to the Warren Group, which tracks the New England housing market. There are no signs of the mortgage crisis letting up, as analysts are predicting the foreclosure numbers for 2008 will double last year’s.
There were almost 800 foreclosures in Massachusetts in January, the highest number in the commonwealth since August. In January, 14 homes were foreclosed in Fitchburg, which had the eighth-highest concentration of foreclosures in the Bay State last year, according to the Boston Globe. Fitchburg had the 10th most foreclosures of any Massachusetts city or town in January. Worcester’s 34 foreclosures were the fourth-most in the state, according to the Warren Group.
After the $130 million is distributed, almost another $35 million will be released some time in the summer when NeighborWorks America analyzes where more funding is needed, Ms. Fitzgerald said.
Mr. Olver said very few homeowners have sought counseling and that now he hopes those at risk will take the initiative.
“They don’t know where to go,” he said. “Now it is the job of the organizations who are getting these monies through NeighborWorks to make certain people know.”
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Clemens at House Hearing Denies He used Performance-Enhancing Drugs
STEROIDS
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Jason Millman
Boston University Washington News Service
Feb. 13, 2008
WASHINGTON – Facing new charges from a former teammate, Roger Clemens on Wednesday continued to deny at a House hearing that he ever used performance-enhancing drugs, while committee members repeatedly raised questions about his credibility and that of his accuser, Brian McNamee.
During a sometimes tense exchange with committee members, Mr. Clemens denied he ever spoke to friend and former teammate Andy Pettitte about using human growth hormone, contradicting sworn depositions and written affidavits Mr. Pettitte and his wife gave to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week. Mr. Pettitte told the committee he and Mr. Clemens had a conversation about Mr. Clemens’s use of human growth hormone in 1999.
Mr. Clemens said he was talking about his wife, Debbie, using the hormone during that 1999 conversation with Mr. Pettitte and that he clarified this with Mr. Pettitte in a 2006 conversation.
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md., pressed Mr. Clemens hard during questioning, reminding him several times he was speaking under oath. He asked Mr. Clemens if he thought Mr. Pettitte – who was scheduled to appear at the hearing until he was excused Monday – lied to the committee.
“I think he misremembered,” Mr. Clemens said.
Mr. Clemens sat two seats away from Mr. McNamee, who first told federal investigators in the Mitchell Report he injected Mr. Clemens with human growth hormone. Mr. Clemens and Mr. McNamee, who have been trading barbs through the media since the Mitchell Report was released in December, gave consistently contradicting testimony.
“It’s impossible to believe this is a simple misunderstanding,” committee chairman Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., said during his opening remarks. “Someone isn’t telling the truth.”
Rep. John F. Tierney, D-Peabody, aggressively questioned Mr. Clemens about why in his sworn deposition he denied three times ever talking to Mr. McNamee about human growth hormone before admitting he had two heated conversations about injecting Mr. Clemens’ wife with the drug without Mr. Clemens’s knowledge.
The five-hour hearing saw some awkward moments, including several occasions when Mr. Clemens’s lawyers rose from their seats behind the former New York Yankees pitcher to directly address the committee though Mr. Waxman told them they were only allowed to speak directly to Mr. Clemens.
The hearing room became tense when leading members probed Mr. Clemens about whether he might have tried to influence witness testimony. Mr. Waxman said the committee asked Mr. Clemens’s attorneys to produce the name and contact information for the family’s former nanny last Friday because they believed she could provide testimony whether Mr. Clemens had attended a party at former baseball player Jose Canseco’s Florida home, where Mr. McNamee said he first approached Mr. Clemens about steroids in 1998. Mr. Clemens said he did not attend the party, and Mr. Canseco gave a written affidavit that Mr. Clemens did not attend.
Mr. Waxman said Mr. Clemens’s legal team did not provide the committee with the nanny’s name until Monday. The nanny, whose name was withheld, told the committee Mr. Clemens was at that 1998 party and Mr. Clemens contacted her on Sunday and invited her to his Texas home even though they had not spoken in eight years.
“I was doing you all a favor,” Mr. Clemens said about contacting the former nanny, adding he was “hurt” by any suggestions he might have tried to sway her comments to the committee.
Some information seemed to corroborate Mr. McNamee’s previous statements. Mr. Pettitte and former Yankee Chuck Knoblauch both admitted in their private meetings with committee members last week to taking human growth hormone.
Committee members questioned Mr. McNamee about why he waited until last week to reveal he had syringes and gauze pads which he said had performance enhancing drugs and Mr. Clemens’s blood on them dating back to 2001.
“I felt horrible to be in the position I was in,” said Mr. McNamee, explaining why he hadn’t turned over the physical evidence when Mitchell Report investigators asked him if he had any.
Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., pointing out inconsistencies in Mr. McNamee’s previous statements to federal investigators and the committee, was visibly upset while questioning Mr. McNamee before launching into a tirade against him.
“This is really disgusting. You're here as a sworn witness. You're here to tell the truth,” Mr. Burton said. “You're here under oath, and yet we have lie after lie after lie after lie, of where you've told this committee and the people of this country that Roger Clemens did things. I don't know what to believe. I know one thing I don't believe and that's you.”
After the hearing, Mr. Waxman would not say if the committee would pursue perjury charges against either Mr. Clemens or Mr. McNamee despite their starkly contradicting testimonies.
“That’s a very different complicated legal question,” he said to reporters. “We knew from the beginning they both couldn’t be telling the truth.”
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Senate Votes to Give Immunity to Telecom Companies
AMENDMENT
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Jason Millman
Boston University Washington News Service
Feb. 12, 2008
WASHINGTON – The Senate voted to grant immunity Tuesday to telecommunication companies that helped the government conduct electronic surveillance of Americans without warrants following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Before the Senate voted Tuesday to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, it resoundingly rejected an amendment, 67-31, that would have denied retroactive immunity to the telecommunication companies. In 2006, a federal district court ruled unconstitutional the Bush administration’s program monitoring phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of conversing with terrorist suspects overseas without a warrant.
Granting retroactive immunity would erase the almost 40 lawsuits pending against telecommunication companies accused of breaking the law.
Though the Senate overwhelming supported reauthorizing the law, the debate on whether to grant immunity had been controversial in the past few weeks. Senators opposing immunity, led by Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd, argued that granting immunity would allow the companies to go unpunished and would protect the Bush administration from future investigations into his surveillance program.
Massachusetts Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry voted to deny immunity and voted against the subsequent bill, which passed 68 to 29.
“Amnesty for these companies may help the administration conceal its illegal spying, but it will not serve our national security, and it will further undermine the rule of law,” Mr. Kennedy said in a statement released by his office.
A spokesman for Mr. Kerry said the senator voted against the bill because he believes it gives the administration too much power without concern for civil liberties.
“If we have learned anything from over seven years of the Bush administration, it's that we can not trust them with sweeping power,” the spokesman said in a statement.
The bill now goes to a joint House and Senate committee to negotiate a final version that will go to the president’s desk. The House version of the bill, passed in the fall, did not give the companies immunity.
President Bush has repeatedly threatened to veto the bill if the companies are not granted legal protection.
Speaking to reporters outside the Senate chamber Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the Senate bill does not include any provisions that would prompt Mr. Bush to use his veto.
Both he and Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said they were confident about the Senate bill.
“This thing has been digested, diced and sliced and so thoroughly debated on the floor, and we have a bipartisan consensus that I hope will be acceptable to the House,” said Mr. Bond, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to reporters Tuesday.
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Bush Budget Denounced by Massachusetts Congressmen
REACT
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Jason Millman
Boston University Washington News Service
Feb. 5, 2008
WASHINGTON – Massachusetts House members denounced President
Bush’s record $3.1 trillion budget proposal Tuesday, contending his 2009 fiscal
year plan sets unrealistic expectations for economic recovery and calls for crippling cuts
to essential social service programs.
“It’s very disappointing,” U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Worcester, said in a telephone interview. “It’s a budget that doesn’t deal with the harsh economic realities that so many citizens are facing. If it ever were enacted, it would hurt a lot of people.”
Mr. McGovern said he believed congressional Republicans and Democrats alike are against the president’s budget.
U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, echoing a common sentiment that Mr. Bush’s proposed budget will be drastically altered in Congress, called the final budget of the president’s administration “unrealistic.”
“It doesn’t include an accurate assessment of needs in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Mr. Neal said in telephone interview. “The president is saying you can have tax cuts and have more and more money for Iraq.”
Mr. Bush’s proposal projects that the budget deficit will rise to $407 billion in 2009, not far from the record-high $413 billion set four years ago. Mr. Bush inherited a $127 billion surplus when he entered office, and he said his budget can provide a $48 billion surplus by 2012. Mr. McGovern called the president’s projection “laughable.”
“This is a president who campaigned for office as a fiscal conservative, and under his leadership, we now have the biggest deficit and debt in the history of the U.S.,” Mr. McGovern said.
Mr. Bush, in the nation’s first-ever $3 trillion budget proposal, calls for $515.4 billion for the Defense Department budget—when adjusted for inflation, the highest amount of annual military spending since World War II
Mr. Neal said the budget proposes program cuts that are too severe, especially to Medicaid and Medicare, which stand to lose $196 billion over the next five years under Bush’s proposal.
“UMass Medical Center and many of the community hospitals rely on Medicare and Medicaid for revenue to sustain their great institutions,” Mr. Neal said.
Proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid funding would “force our hospitals to dip that much more into their already squeezed budgets,” U.S. Rep. John W. Olver, D-Amherst, said in a statement.
Mr. Olver decried Mr. Bush’s proposed cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides money to low-income families to help pay home heating costs. Mr. Bush’s budget calls for $1.7 billion for the program, with an additional $300 million in contingency funds, for a total of $2 billion next year, a 22 percent drop from the $2.57 billion the program received this year.
Almost 140,000 Massachusetts families receive some sort of assistance from the program, according to the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development.
“It is unconscionable that the president has targeted this program for cuts despite the fact that home heating costs have increased by 80 percent since he took office,” Mr. Olver said.
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Act Would Designate MMM Trails Under National Care
TRAILS
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Jason Millman
Boston University Washington News Service
January 30, 2008
WASHINGTON – A plan to unite almost 200 miles of hiking trails extending from northern Massachusetts to the Long Island Sound in Connecticut has come one step closer to approval with the House vote in favor of it.
The bill calls for the Metacomet-Monadnock-Mattabesett Trail System, a combined 190 miles of hiking paths that reaches as far north as Royalston and touches parts of Worcester, to be united under the new name of the New England National Scenic Trail in the care of the National Park Service.
The bill would authorize the creation of an additional 30 miles of trails to connect the 190-mile route of existing trails that run through 39 Massachusetts communities. The bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. John W. Olver, D-Amherst, was cosponsored by representatives whose districts are included in the trail system.
Mr. Olver, speaking on the floor of the House before Tuesday’s 261-122 vote, said the trails provided a “unique recreational opportunity within urban areas.” More than 2 million people live within 10 miles of the trails.
After almost seven years of research, public meetings, mailings to landowners and a National Park Service report, planning agencies have developed proposed locations for the trail extensions. Landowners must give their consent to have their land included into the National Trail System, but some landowners have raised concerns that having federal land in their backyard could raise problems in the future.
Cinda Jones, president of Cowls Land and Lumber Company in North Amherst, owns eight miles of timberland in the MMM Trails. Ms. Jones, who has been one of the most vocal opponents of the bill because she does not want her land to fall under federal regulations, has requested that the MMM Trails be rerouted before they are designated for the Park Service. Even though the Park Service proposal calls for a reroute around Ms. Jones’ property, the exact route for what would become the New England National Scenic Trail cannot be finalized until the act becomes official.
“Until they reroute it, it’s going through landowners’ property who don’t want it,” Ms. Jones said in a telephone interview.
Ms. Jones also expressed concern that the government may take land by eminent domain even though the bill explicitly states that the Park Service has no authority to take land without consent from the owners. The same sentiment was echoed by representatives opposed to the federal designation before Tuesday’s House vote.
“Whatever they say today is well and good, but anyone in the future can change it,” Ms. Jones said.
Mr. Olver acknowledged concerns about eminent domain in his remarks before Tuesday’s vote. He said landowners are not in danger of losing their property.
“Protection of private property has been of utmost concern,” Mr. Olver said.
Heather Clish, deputy director of conservation for the Appalachian Mountain Club , which currently oversees maintenance of the Massachusetts portion of the MMM Trails, said putting the trails under the Park Service would help conserve the land.
“Once it’s designated, it would benefit the trail by giving it the recognition and the potential for additional financial resources that would help things like maintain communication with landowners and protect trails through partnership with local owners,” Ms. Clish said.
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Senators Push to Attach LIHEAP Funding to Stimulus Plan
FUNDING
Worcester Telegram and Gazette
Jason Millman
Boston University Washington News Service
January 30, 2008
WASHINGTON – Citing a need for extra assistance to help low-income families pay for home energy, a bipartisan group of senators has called for extra funds to be included in the economic stimulus plan, playing down concerns that changing the House version of the bill in the Senate could slow the process of approving the stimulus package.
The senators asked that up to $3.6 billion be attached to the stimulus plan to provide funds for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) in a press conference Wednesday morning before the Senate debated the stimulus plan on the floor.
President Bush, in his State of the Union address Monday night, urged the House to quickly pass a $146 billion stimulus plan to provide tax rebates and business tax breaks in an effort to lift the lagging economy. He urged the Senate not to “load up the bill” with more spending because it would “delay or derail” the stimulus plan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also has pressed the Senate to quickly approve the House version of the bill, which passed 385-35 on Tuesday.
Sen. Susan M. Collins, R-Maine, said she wants to meet the president’s goal of passing the stimulus by next week but stressed that the Senate needs to inspect the bill before signing off on it.
“The idea that the Senate shouldn’t have ideas . . . is not one I can accept,” Ms. Collins said during the press conference.
Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., announced his support of the move to include home energy assistance in the stimulus package.
“Unless Washington acts, we’ll have thousands of people go cold this winter, and that’s unacceptable,” Mr. Kerry said in a statement.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Bush released $450 million in emergency funds – of which Massachusetts received $27.2 million – to help low-income families pay their heating bills Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, urged the Bush administration to provide more funds after the emergency money was released.
“The administration must work to see that this program is fully funded, ensuring that no one will be left out in the cold,” Sen. Kennedy said.
As of now, Massachusetts is set to receive $109.1 million in home energy aid for the 2008 fiscal year, down from $126.5 million in the 2006 fiscal year, according to the National Community Action Foundation.
Almost 141,000 Massachusetts residents received some form of such assistance last winter, according to the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development.
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